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Tastemade Raises $40M to Fuel Growth

Food, travel and lifestyle-focused digital media company Tastemade announced today that it has closed $40 million Series D financing led by Goldman Sachs.

According to the company, Tastemade has grown at triple digit rates year-over-year, and now reaches over 100 million monthly active viewers and over 1 billion views monthly across platforms, including YouTube, Apple TV, Snapchat and Facebook.

“We’re thinking about each of the individual platforms and how consumers want to consume the content,” Tastemade co-founder Larry Fitzgibbon told VideoInk. “It’s the same core assets, but the way we edit the video, the length and in some cases the pacing, all are influenced by each individual platform. And then once we’re on the platform, just putting content up isn’t enough. How you engage and develop your audience is really the one-two punch of the modern media landscape.”

Tastemade will use the new round of funding — which also included participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Raine Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Liberty Media, Scripps Networks Interactive, and Tohokushinsha Film Corporation — to further build out its sales team, grow its presence across platforms, and expand its international operations.

“Our Facebook page in Brazil now has over 3 million fans, and it was kind of next to nothing even 12 months ago,” Tastemade co-founder Larry Fitzgibbon told VideoInk. “We’re seeing hundreds of millions of views in Brazil alone each month.”

Tastemade has been working with brands on such series as globe-trotting cocktail-making show “Local Flight,” sponsored by Grey Goose Vodka, and “Heritage,” a recently-launched show sponsored by San Pellegrino profiling different chefs around the country. Fitzgibbon is particularly proud of the James Beard Award-nominated “The Grill Iron,” its series about tailgating sponsored by Hyundai, which has also aired on the Cooking Channel.

Moving forward, “it’s really about executing what we’re doing, but just trying to do it bigger and faster,” Fitzgibbon said. “There a lot of companies investing in new services that are a great opportunity for people like us who want to create amazing content and wrap it in a brand and distribute it on all platforms.”

Tastemade Raises $40M to Fuel Growth was last modified: August 16th, 2017 by Todd Longwell